“Today each TiVo polls TiVoâ€™s severs roughly every 15 minutes to check for new scheduled recordings, TiVoCast downloads, Unbox downloads, etc. Thatâ€™s highly inefficient – nearly all of those polling calls are for nothing. There is nothing waiting to be done. And it introduces a lag when you want to start a download – up to 15 minutes. And it doesnâ€™t scale well as TiVoâ€™s user base keeps growing.

So whatâ€™s changed? The polling system is gone. TiVo is using XMPP now instead. What is XMPP? The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol – better known as the instant messaging protocol that powers Jabber, Google Talk, and other IM systems.” – Peter St. Andre noticed as interesting announcement coming out of CES. (via aaron)

Growth in social systems in non-linear. Ignore the network effect at your peril.

Kick the Tires

Also interesting was “Real Life Load Tests”. The GTalk team deployed to Orkut and GMail weeks before actually turning on the UI for the features to be able to monitor the load. These are the practices that make Bill’s recent observation on HA systems possible:

An interesting takeaway is that it’s clearly possible to re-architect data storage on super-busy production systems seemingly no matter where you start from.